Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is powerful library used by major GIS software from QGIS, ArcGIS, Udig even statistical software like R. It has a powerful set of command line tools and interface that can be accessed from variety of programming languages like C++, Java, Python, Perl, C# and Ruby.

When using GDAL on Linux everything is quite straight forward. But windows it can be a bit tricky and frustrating when different components are installed separately. To use GDAL easily on windows, it is recommended to use the [OSGEO4W - 32 bit](http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/osgeo4w-setup-x86.exe) package or [OSGEO4W - 64 bit](http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/osgeo4w-setup-x86_64.exe). Once the installer has been downloaded, run the package making sure you are connected to the Internet and select the option you would like to use. There are several options, you can use either express install or advance install, but for our case since we want to use the gdal package, you can select advance install. The from there search for the gdal package and install.